New Yorkers have a very stubborn relationship with history. In a city nearly 400 years old that does little to remember its past, the subways are but another example of the way we live in the present. As far as most riders are concerned, the subway map is immutable representation of where the trains go, where they have always gone and where they will go.
So on Monday morning, New Yorkers will be in for a surprise. What is this train going from Essex St. to Broadway/Lafayette? Many aren’t even aware that this service route is possible. While we know about the Chrystie St. Cut, it hasn’t seen revenue service since the mid-1970s and remains a tunnel lost in time — until Monday, that is.
In a few years, the W and V trains will fade from memory. They will be nothing more than nine-year blips just as the nearly-forgotten 9 and K trains are. “The W to Astoria?” a future New Yorker will question. “Don’t you mean the Q?”
Nearly ten years ago, when the MTA announced plans to introduce the V and W trains, Randy Kennedy of The Times explored the new train designations. Those two trains were the first new ones since Transit introduced the skip-stop Z and 9 service in 1988 and 1989 respectively. Suddenly, the city would have to come to grips with interlopers on its subway map.
These new trains led Kennedy on a hunt to find out how Transit names its trains, and no one could explain the rational behind the numbered and lettered line. The following passage though jumped out at me:
A call was put in to Clifton Hood, the author of ”722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York” (Simon & Schuster, 1993). Mr. Hood admitted that in a subject as sprawling as the subway, he had to leave many things out of his research for the book, the shadowy system of subway naming among them.
But Mr. Hood said that he has noticed how firmly each generation seems to latch on to the subway designations of its era, acting as if the names had been handed down from a mountain on stone tablets. Subway riders of a certain age, for example, will never think of the D train as the D train. It is the Brighton Line. They do not switch from the N train to the No. 4. They switch from the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation) to the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company).
”Each generation invests its own infrastructure with some emotionality,” Mr. Hood said. ”And it serves a purpose. They need to take possession of it for themselves. Otherwise, how do you make sense of it every day? You need to make it yours.”
Today, the W is ours. The V is ours. Some people will ride those trains home from work in a few hours and practically ignore the train. It pulls up; they get on; they get off. On Monday, the V won’t arrive, but the M will. In the W’s stead, the Q will show. Those trains too will be ours soon enough. and they will become part of the temporary permanence of the subway map.
11 comments
Todd likes this.
I agree that there are many riders who do not remember the last use of the Chrystie Street cut, and are unaware the route is possible. Indeed, most riders know only of the possibilities shown on the map at any given time. Eventually, most people will think that the G cannot go any farther than Court Square.
Many New Yorkers have irrational attachments to letters of the alphabet, but I don’t think the V and the W lasted long enough for anyone to have fallen in love with them. Another factor is that they are both fill-in routes: they don’t serve any stations uniquely. Few who use these routes would have come to depend on them, since neither train runs at all times. I suspect most Astoria riders take the first train that comes, and if necessary, switch later on.
There actually is a pattern to the way most of the letters were assigned, though it has become somewhat obscured by changes that happened later. When the V and W came along, the MTA was partly constrained by the unused letters available on rollsigns.
I’m old enough to remember when the KK and later the K used the Chrystie Street connection that the M is about to take over. Real old times might remember that trains used to be able to get to the Nassau Loop via the Manhattan Bridge.
Some day soon, we’ll start encountering people who don’t know that it’s possible to route trains from the Montague Street tube to Nassau Street.
What happened was that the Independent (IND) labeled its routes with the letters of the beginning of the alphabet. The A was the first line to be built (with its local AA). They then added the C Councourse Express and CC Concourse Local when the Concourse Line was built. (The IND planned to add the BB and D trains once the 6th Avenue Line was built.) They then added the E train, again, working around the BB/D trains, and GG (working around the F).
Since the IND decided to use letters instead of numbers, when numbers were assigned to the BMT lines in 1960, they picked up where the IND left off. The HH was the Rockaway Park Shuttle. They started at J (since I would look like a “1”), and continued further down the alphabet, skipping some letters like K, which was used for the Chrystie Street Conncetion train.
Spot on piece I say. To me (a kinda older guy), the W and V were intruders in the system where the forgotten lines sound like AA. That little 4 car train did a lot of work back then and shouldered a big responsibility all by its little self. But the W and V with their marginal ridership that few knew much about until they became political pawns in the complicated and highly politicized environment that surrounds mass transit funding reductions here in NYC? Nay, I say. Give me back my D, M and QB on the Brigton Line, and send that B back from whence it came to the West End!
A good weekend to all.
In my lifetime, the D has run on the Culver Line, then the Brighton Line, and then on the West End Line. Maybe while I’m still around they’ll decide to switch to the Sea Beach or the 4th Ave. Line.
CORRECTION
I meant to say:
In my lifetime, the D train has run on the Culver Line, then the Brighton Line, and then on the West End Line. Maybe while I’m still around they’ll decide to switch the D train to the Sea Beach Line or the 4th Ave. Line.
Don’t give them any ideas!
The M has also gotten around quite a bit. In the 70’s it was on the Brighton line. In the late 80’s it was moved to the West End, where it’s generally stayed put until today, but for a month or two after 9/11, it ran on the Sea Beach line instead of the N! Of course, next week it isn’t going to run towards Coney Island at all, instead turning north and running to Forest Hills.
You know what no one has mentioned yet, the R160’s do not have and automatic scripts for the M train to go to Forest Hills.
So basically you will be hearing a whole lot of “ding” with the conductor making the stop announcement OR you will be hearing the train saying V Train because the V line on the announcement script list actually has a selection for the V to go to Metropolitan.
So sunday will be very interesting.
I would think they would be loaded in the trains (along with the orange bullet) by Monday. But as a Secret Conductor, you obviously have more of an inside knowledge than I do.
Actualy today the orange M bullet is now used on the M shuttle trains. Noticed it 1st hand and taken a picture of it.